The betrayal of Shingal
Commentary by Hayri Demir, translated from EzidiPress German
One year ago, the terrorist militia Islamic State overran the major area of settlement of the Yezidi minority Shingal in northern Iraq. The caliphate´s henchmen crushed village by village, perpetrated one massacre after another against the helpless civilian population, piled up their victims´ bodies one above the other and abducted and enslaved thousands of defenseless women and girls. A crime that constitutes allmost all criteria of a genocide under the Geneva Convention. For the Yezidis, the Shingal region embodies their carotid of religion, culture, history as well as the Yezidi resistance. All Yezidis´ revolts and uprisings started out from there or came to their end.
The disaster of Shingal prompted the world to go to a war against the IS and send weapons, advisors and military equipment to the crisis region. U.S. President Obama ordered airstrikes against the IS on August 8, 2014 to prevent an “imminent genocide” and liberate the Yezidis trapped in the mountains. The U.S. would not stand “idly by” and watch a minority threatened by the IS to be exterminated. And the airstrikes indeed rescued – despite all the political controversies from the so called anti-interventionist camp – over 60,000 Yezidis stranded on the mountains. The U.S. kept its word and did not stand idly by while U.S. critics such as Jurgen Todenhofer provided the IS with a platform to “unmask the propaganda behind”, he later explained. As if the IS which even utters its own magazine ever tried to hide its ideology from the public.
Yezidi refugee girl on the run from the Islamic State´s terror henchmen in Shingal
